Scrap the meaningless terms Left and Right and reclaim the honourable title 'reactionary'

The debate between Damian Thompson and Daniel Hannan over whether the BNP should be designated a Left- or Right-wing party has raised some interesting points; but it has not addressed the more important issue – that we must abandon this increasingly misleading terminology, based on the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly of 1789, as its irrational straitjacketing has reduced political discourse to fatuity. I have already advanced that argument here, last September.

In 1789, in the Assembly, the increasingly alarmed partisans of the ancien régime sat on the right-hand side (Côté Droit) of the president, the revolutionaries on his left-hand side (Côté Gauche). This terminology was first made familiar to the English-speaking world by Thomas Carlyle, in Volume I of "The French Revolution": “Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cote Droit), a Left Side (Cote Gauche); sitting on M. le President’s right hand, or on his left: the Cote Droit conservative; the Cote Gauche destructive.”

That recognition of the character of so-called progressive forces as “destructive” was a valuable insight; the reviving of the memory of the Left/Right alignment, however, was less beneficial. Yet this terminology did not gain popular currency until as late as 1897, when the psychologist William James disseminated the phrase “left wing”. By the 1930s it was all-pervasive. Today it has infantilised politics (and the BBC) to the extent that mutinous Russian armoured columns advancing on Moscow to restore Marxism-Leninism were described as “Right-wing”.

We have to get rid of this nonsensical vocabulary. The correct terminology for those who futilely seek to improve the world through some innovatory creed such as socialism is “radical”, “liberal” or, preferably, “progressive”, since that places some onus on them to explain to what destination they imagine they are progressing. In the more extreme cases they may be described as “revolutionary”.

Their opponents should not hesitate to reclaim the currently pejorative term “reactionary”. It describes a coherent process: an examination of a failed innovation leading to a determination to return to the status quo ante; it is what a scientist does in the laboratory when an experiment fails. It is ironic that, since the days of Hume, progressive thinkers have been fixated on the notion of empiricism; this has paralysed the human imagination, leading to the discarding of religion and many metaphysical insights. Yet, if empiricism reigns supreme, what could be more empirical than reaction, contrasted with progressives’ blind advance towards an unknown Utopian goal? There is a supreme contradiction there in radical thought, by no means the only one.

Ultimately, political allegiances are determined by cultural factors, which is why in an advanced society such as America “culture wars” are at the core of political confrontation. That is why the most accurate term for anyone who opposes all the disastrous consequences of the French Revolution is Traditionalist. This has long been recognised in Spain where political thought, in this respect, is more than a century ahead of Britain.

The great Thomist political philosopher Juan Vázquez de Mella y Fanjul, in the late 19th century, stressed the distinction between traditionalists and “conservatives”, the opportunists who, under the prime minister Cánovas del Castillo, engineered the alternation of power between the Liberal and Conservative parties, ruining Spain in the process.

That 19th-century political degeneracy has reached Britain today in the shape of the noisome Brokeback Coalition. The late Frederick Wilhelmsen, Thomist academic and devoted Carlist, emphasised the continuing validity of Mella’s distinction between Traditionalists and Conservatives: conservatives can comfortably compromise with the French Revolution, traditionalists cannot. The irreconcilable differences between conservatives (pragmatic, unprincipled, self-seeking) and traditionalists have emerged in the Catholic Church where, today, the greatest enemies of the restoration of pre-Second Vatican Catastrophe orthodoxy are not the fading liberals but the so-called conservative faction, marinated in liberal heterodoxy but assuming some of the trappings of authentic Catholicism.

Let us, meantime, spare a thought for the victims of war. It is an axiom that when Dan Hannan, an inveterate Ironside with “Naseby” engraved on his heart, engages in a ruthless artillery duel with fanatical Pontifical Zouave Damian Thompson, fortified by plenary indulgences, those of a sensitive disposition may be driven out of their wits. This is the sad fate of Ed West, as testified by his latest post where he writes: “The political philosophy of fascism, Nazism, neo-fascism and fascist-lite groups such as the British National Party stems not from socialism but from the ultra-conservative philosophy of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and other opponents of the French Revolution.”

One can only hope that, at some time in the not too distant future, Ed will come to his senses and recognise those words as the most wrong-headed sentence he has ever penned. The first begetters of both Communism and Nazism were the proto-totalitarian Jacobins of the French Revolution. The DNA is so precise a match that, in the course of massacring up to 400,000 Catholic royalists, the majority of them women and children, in the Vendée, the revolutionary government instructed scientists to investigate the possibility of mass extermination by pumping poison gas into mines; a tannery processed human skin; does that not strike certain resonances?

Sorry, Ed, but a man who has traced an apostolic succession from Joseph de Maistre to Mussolini, Hitler and Nick Griffin needs to lie down in a darkened room. In 19th-century Europe the Masonic and liberal revolts against the pre-unitary Italian dynasties paved the way for Fascism; Bismarck’s defeat of the Habsburgs prepared the way for Nazism. All revolutionaries are the enemies of the traditionalist Catholic and monarchic order which Maistre, Bonald, Châteaubriand, Vázquez de Mella, Victor Pradera and many others championed. I hope Ed West feels better soon.